Page 86 of Things We Never Said
‘Has what, what?’ you said. You were quite drunk.
‘Has it ended?’
‘It certainly looks like it,’ you said sadly, and for a moment I thought that the phrase contained everything I needed to know. It said that, yes, you’d had an affair. And no, I hadn’t been mad to imagine it. And yes, it was over. Your tone even expressed that you were sad about the fact. And momentarily I felt better about Jake. I felt justified. But then I realised that the music had stopped. I realised that you were talking not about Mags, but about the party.
‘It doesn’t matter, though,’ you continued, ‘because it’s been brilliant. Best party ever.’ And then you leaned in to kiss me. You reeked of cigarettes and whisky. ‘And it doesn’t matter,’ you added, ‘because I love ya. And what could be more important than that?’
Things went a bit strange, for a while, after that.
I suppose I must have been worrying about you and Maggie again, because I quite subtly pushed her away. We lost the habit of seeing her for a bit, which was a shame, really. As you seemed sadder than usual, I assumed that Maggie’s absence was the reason and evidently that didn’t help things either.
With hindsight, though, I’d say that something different was going on. I think that once you hit fifty, we started to become aware of our mortality. Up until that point we had pretty much carried on as if everything was going to continue forever.
Mum dying was the start of it all, I reckon. That threw the notion of random, unpredictable death into the mix. And then your dad died, and then Iris at work, and then Pete’s wife Sylvia got cancer. The prognosis for Sylvia’s cancer was pretty bad at the time, but it looks like she’s going to outlive me by a mile. I wonder if these things really do just come down to chance or if she somehow led a better life than I did and deserved a better outcome.
Anyway, death was in the air. I don’t think either of us ever put any of this into words. It was just a thing that lurked in the ether around us, a feeling, a slowly dawning realisation, an awareness. But I know that you were feeling it too, because you came up with that hare-brained scheme to move to New Zealand. We watched a couple on some terrible television programme who had done just that and you said you wanted to do one last amazing thing before we got too old for it. The subtext, I’m pretty sure, was ‘before we die’.
We never did move to New Zealand, did we, baby? And though I’m sad that we never managed to have that adventure together, I’m also grateful that we stayed here in Cambridge. Because if we had moved, we would never have had all these people around us when we needed them. And we were going to need them sooner than we thought.
On Thursday evening, when Sean gets home from work, he finds Maggie sitting in her car outside with the windows open. She’s reading something on her smartphone and only glances up when he leans in the window. ‘Oh, hello!’ she says.
‘Hi Mags,’ Sean says, bemusedly.
‘Look, I’m not stalking you or anything. Please don’t think I’m stalking you. I just thought I’d give it ten minutes before I gave up on you because I know you’re always home about now.’
Sean opens his palms towards the sky. ‘Well, here I am,’ he says.
Maggie closes the windows and then climbs out. She looks at Sean over the top of the Fiat. ‘So cold this evening!’ she exclaims. ‘Is now a bad time?’
Sean shakes his head. ‘Now’s fine, Mags. Come in. Have a cuppa.’
Maggie follows him to the front door, saying, ‘I know I should have phoned, only I was driving past and I wanted to congratulate you.’
Sean stands aside and ushers Maggie through the front door. ‘Congratulate me?’
‘On your move!’
‘April,’ Sean says.
Maggie glances back at him and nods. ‘It’s a good job she called me because otherwise I wouldn’t even have known. You secretive devil.’
‘It’s not definite yet,’ Sean says, hanging his jacket over the back of a chair. ‘I’ve just come from Barclays, actually.’
‘The bank? Oh, how exciting.’
‘No, it was pretty boring, actually.’
‘Oh? What did they say, then? Bad news?’
‘No, they’re agreed. In principle. For a bridging loan.’
‘Right,’ Maggie says, her brow furrowing. ‘A bridging loan. Is that when ... Remind me, will you? I think I know, but remind me.’
‘They lend you money so you can buy a place and then sell yours afterwards.’
‘Right. Of course. I knew that.’
‘Tea?’ Sean offers, gesturing vaguely at the kettle.
